a big problem in our public discourse is that when people just keep repeating a mantra of a contested assertion and taking it as fact long enough, they just come to base their worldview around it without questioning their presumptions.
they are just taking it as a given that the Trump Tower meeting constitutes a draw a moral equivalence saying that because Trump Jr showed interest in the meeting, that shows a moral willingness to commit a massive conspiracy to influence the election with hacking or vote rigging or any of that.
when everything they say stems from that assumption, then everything they wind up reasoning is invalid if we contradict that assumption

and thats where we have to go all the way back and say that no, in a world of nuance and rationality, the Trump Tower meeting never demonstrated anything like that
Being willing to hear out a proposition without even knowing what its about, isn't the same thing as agreeing to it, nor was the proposition anything like the grand conspiracy the muellerburger alleges
First off, just hearing it isn't unethical or illegal. They clearly didn't even know what the proposal was, and it turned out to be magnitsky lobbyists. Their belief going into the meeting was that they had documents showing Hillary receiving illegal campaign money from Russia or some other kind of financial misdealings in Russia- that was just a honeytrap. It doesn't really matter whether they thought this information was coming from russian 'support' or not, because at that point all they thought they knew was that Hillary might have illicit dealings in russia that could be revealed.
Second, it would be up to them to decide what to do if they actually did receive such information. If the lobbyists had actually been whistleblowers from Russia with information about Hillary instead of just an excuse to get in the door, then it would have been a moral if not legal question about what they should do with the documents. If they immediately turned them over to the FBI its one thing, if they published them to the media to do with as they please its another, if they held them back for maximum political damage as an october surprise its another, and if they cynically blackmailed hillary now that would be illegal. But its patently unreasonable to suggest that they should have either refused to take such a meeting in the first place without any idea what its about, or that they needed to have FBI agents swarming the building and listening to the whole thing for it to be kosher. That's just getting ridiculous. Nobody could take two steps onto the internet and read a rumor without a team of agents escorting them in such a world.
but Third, its all belied by the fact that not only did Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC get put into a similar situation with foreign support from the Ukraine / Russia / China / etc- they actually did it. They got manaforts ledger from the ukrainian embassy and exploited it to attack him. They paid active kremlin agents for opposition research on Trump to assemble the steele dossier. And god knows what Cui Tiankei was up to, at least he knows how to be discrete, the Chinese deserve some respect for being the only adults in the room and knowing how to cover their tracks- and they were probably hacking Hillary the whole time anyway.


I think its absurd to draw this axiomatic moral supposition that just because they bothered to sit down at the Trump Tower meeting and get bamboozled by some lobbyists or just because they tried- and failed- to learn what Wikileaks was up to, that is all that it takes to demonstrate a moral culpability totally equivalent to a willingness to conspire with russia to subvert the election and engage in any manner of corrupt enterprises to destroy our democracy.
Its nonsense

Trying to learn if the other team is cheating and trying to figure out what bombshell is about to hit the election is not the same thing as a willingness to cheat or a willingness to set off bombs. Especially not when the other team really was cheating, and really was setting off bombs, and now shills are out accusing you of being morally bankrupt for passive awareness.

Well that would be interesting except it's not true. Declaring a Natl. Emergency is legal and has been done many times by many presidents.
The only problem with this one is the Democrats.

I didn't say it was illegal. I said it was an end run around Congress' authority, and had not been done in that fashion by any other President.

everything always circles back to Jurassic park

like Malcolm said yall so focused on if you could you didn't stop to think if you should

the argument is improper use which there is a much stronger case for than proper use given the chain of events

Its definitely an end run around congress, but that's nothing new unto itself. Obama came up with like 20 different ways to do it, I don't think what door gets opened to do it, is as important as what is done.
That's one thing that struck me about the media response to it. People said, 'imagine when the next democratic president uses this precedent to fund his xxxxx!'
well shit, our last president conjured $1.4 trillion in payments to Iran by taking a defunct legal case and 'settling' it with 40 years of 'interest' paid from the judgment fund as an unlimited permanent appropriation without congressional approval.
For the risk corridors, he just waved his magic wand.

What I think all this goes back to is demonstrating that Trump has never been and never will be the ideologue constitutionalist that the federalist society wants him to be. He clearly has no such hangups. He barely hides the fact he's pro-life

This post was edited by Goomshill on Apr 6 2019 12:14pm

You mean "... he's pro-choice", dont you?



While I agree with your general sentiment that Trump avoiding congressional appropriation to fund his wall is not nearly as unprecedented as it is made to be by the media and Democrats on Capitol Hill, I think that you're underselling the risk this carries.
By setting a precedent, Trump willl make it easier morally and politically for his successors to follow in his footsteps and argue for their favorite cause along the same lines. This is true even if a Democratic president could find other ways around Congress.

oops yeah

So, I both disagree and agree with you.

First off, I disagree, taking the Trump tower meeting(based off the description in the emails) was seriously unethical. Any reasonable person on a campaign would have turned it down at the very least, and perhaps even notified the FBI. Of course it matters if they knew that the meeting was part of the Russian government's willingness to help the campaign. It's just silly to assert otherwise. Taking that meeting is absolutely indefensible. I'm not going to touch the Ukraine and Steele dossier stuff... I don't think it's the same thing, and I'm not even sure the Ukraine stuff has been established.

But I'll agree with you that taking the meeting doesn't necessarily mean you'll go down the path of a conspiracy with Russians. But if we're being honest... Manafort is definitely capable of that, and Don Jr/Kusher probably are capable. These aren't the most ethical people in the world.

Jonah's points are valid though. Any reasonable person looking at the evidence of Russiagate would think that it was at the very least suspicious and worth investigating. I know you like to view every piece of evidence in the most charitable way possible... but we're not all Trumpshills here.

We already know exactly what happened and they're open about it- the ukrainian embassy established a liaison with the DNC while it was under Hillary's control, gave them Manafort's ledger, which they then sent to the media and successfully got him kicked off the Trump campaign in damage control. Setting in motion the investigation that put him in prison. We already know the names of those involved- Alexandra Chalupa was the DNC consultant who set it up.

Now put yourself into the shoes of a Donald Trump Jr or Jared Kushner prior to the Trump Tower meeting. You hear that some lobbyists, who are ethnic Russian but have been around DC since forever and aren't members of the Russian government, claim to have some information about Hillary having illegal financial misdealings like illegal campaign contributions from Russia. The guy setting it up says its part of Russia's support for Trump. And lets remember- this was all long before any screaming about Russia in the media. They weren't a toxic subject at the time. There was no great fearmongering or hostility, the idea that Russia would interfere in the election wasn't in anyone's mind. John Podesta decided to sit down in a meeting with Cui Tiankei during the election off the books, did anyone throw a fit over that? At the time, China was no more or less radioactive than Russia. But in some alternate universe where Hillary won and Trump supporters screamed about Chinese collusion for years, maybe that meeting with Cui Tiankei would be the Trump Tower equivalent, just through the lens of hindsight.

Do you really think that just listening to it, to see if its real, to see what its about, just to learn the basics of what this nebulous concept might actually be- is already "seriously unethical"?
If its seriously unethical to just learn what an offer is, whats at stake, whether its legit or not (as it turns out: not)- then how are we supposed to regard someone who not only listens to the offer, but sees that its real, agrees to it, actually receives the information, then instead of turning it over to law enforcement chooses to weaponize it in the media?

Just taking the meeting isn't morally reprehensible. When you don't know anything, you can't know if its a morally treacherous enterprise or not. For all you know, its innocuous, or a fraud. Or maybe its a whistleblower trying to reveal corruption and blow the lid off a major scandal. That's what it was being sold as. And if that had been the case, then he'd have a moral responsibility to listen to it and turn it over to law enforcement. And we sit here with benefit of hindsight, benefit of knowing of the Russia->Wikileaks emails, nearly 3 years of screaming about russiaburgers, and try to pass moral judgment on the actions of someone in a completely different context at the time



There was enough to start a counterintelligence investigation and look into what Russia was doing, but I disagree very much with the idea that it should apply to Trump
There was never any compelling evidence to suggest collusion. We already knew what Russia did, and why, prior to the election, prior to the investigation. Trumpshills like myself correctly identified the sequence of events and motivations of the actors before Trump was sworn into office. They could have read my posts on jsp and figured it out. PBS was airing specials explaining it. It wasn't a secret, and everything we've seen so far in Mueller's reports and indictments has just echoed and confirmed it.

But I take it much farther than that- I don't think just think it wasn't justified to open a probe in general, I think you shouldn't be opening probes into presidential candidates unless you have some rock solid evidence that needs to be investigated. Rumors, flimsy opposition research, wishful thinking, politically motivated conspiracy theories- those shouldn't even register on the scale. There should be a smoking gun before anyone even dreams about using the FBI to spy on a presidential candidate. And heck, they had that against Hillary thanks to her server.

Its corrosive to democracy, its teetering on the brink of an authoritarian nightmare like we're some banana republic. I've said it before, to any responsible FBI chief, wiretapping a presidential candidate should be like poking your head under the Queen of England's skirt because you think she's an impostor. 1) Its ridiculous and never going to happen and 2) You better be damn sure before you risk it.

David and Jonah are my favorite right-wingers.





This post was edited by IceMage on Apr 6 2019 06:19pm